#BookBingoNW2022: Banned or challenged book

Reading the news lately, it feels like there has been an increase in the challenging and banning of books, particularly around discussions of Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ representation. If you’re looking to fill your “Banned or challenged book” Book Bingo square, consider one of these titles:

In China, Unfree Speech:  The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act, Now is banned. It was censored due to inciting secession and taken out of libraries following passage of the Hong Kong national security law (2020).[1] The book itself is written by Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong protest leader. The book is divided into 3 parts: how Wong became a political activist, the letters he wrote while he was a political prisoner and a call to action for how we can change democracy.

Prisons often have different rules about which books are allowed in their libraries. One of these is The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, banned in North Carolina prisons and elsewhere because it was “likely to provoke confrontation between racial groups.”[2] The book itself is “a civil-rights lawyer’s disturbing view of why young black men make up the majority of the more than two million people now in America’s prisons.” (Kirkus Review)

All Boys Aren’t Blue: a Memoir-manifesto by George Johnson has been challenged at different schools by being “called  “dirty” and describe what they say is “pornographic” language, inappropriate for minors. They say the books could cause mental health issues for students.”[3] The book, a collection of essays, “centers the experiences, desires, and agency of a queer Black boy navigating his evolving selfhood and the challenges of society’s conditional love for his truthful existence.” (Kirkus Review)

Not Your Mother’s Gone With the Wind

I just finished reading the horror book When the Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen.  It is a horror novel set in modern times on a plantation that has been refurbished to an amusement park that reenacts Antebellum times through the eyes of white people, but what they don’t know is that it is haunted by the ghosts of the slaves that worked the plantation.  While I was reading this book it made me think of other media that are more honest in their representation of the Antebellum South than Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

If science fiction is more your thing, I highly recommend Octavia Butler’s  Kindred.  It is the story of a black woman who moves into a new place with her white husband.  While they are unpacking she starts to be sent back in time to rescue a white boy from near-death experiences but is thought to be a slave every time she goes back.

For a great TV show, I recommend Underground.  This is exciting series had 2 seasons.  It tells the stories of slaves that have escaped from the plantation and how they survived while they are on the run. Jubilee by Margaret Walker is a classic novel that is hailed as a truer account of the civil war than Gone with the Wind.  It is told from the perspective of the daughter of the plantation owner and his black mistress.  Margaret Walker used her own family research to tell this story.

     ~ posted by Pam H.

Surrounded by ADHD

The last year has been interesting, complicated, and/or stressful for all. In my household we add the diagnosis of ADHD to all of my immediate family members except me. One way that quarantine worked for my family is that we were all working or schooling from home. There was not the desperate search in the morning for keys, wallets, backpacks and anything else that we would need for the day but not placed in its “right” place.

Being all in the same house hasn’t been all easy though. Some of the ADHD behaviors have just transferred to other things. Like right now I am “reminding” my teenage son for the third time to clean the kitchen and do laundry. He is hyper-focused on his screen, whether it is his game system or YouTube. My husband, who is hyper-focused on work, is forgetting to “remind” him to do the chores. So it falls on me to remember what needs to be done and when.

I have gathered together a few books for me and hopefully for the men in my life to read/listen too. Hopefully it will make all of our lives easier and it could help your family, too.

ADHD 2.0 New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving With Distraction–from Childhood Through Adulthood

This book is coming out this year. I was able to get a sneak peak at it. The nice thing about this book is that it helps people and parents who are dealing with ADHD to look for what they or their loved ones are really good at. It is kind of a nice change because usually the focus of these books is what is wrong with people and how to fix it.

Romantic Christmas Movies

Nothing says Christmas season to me more than cuddling up under a warm blanket with a mug of hot chocolate and watching a holiday romantic movie.  Unfortunately, I don’t have cable so I can’t binge-watch the Hallmark Channel.  But luckily for me, the library owns a lot of the movies.  To find the whole list just put  “Hallmark Channel holiday collection” in the search bar. 

I wanted to highlight a few of these themed movies for you.  It is not Christmas at my house until all the family sits down and watches Almost Christmas together.  This romantic comedy  is about a crazy family and all their quirks but the romance centers around one of the daughters and the next door neighbor’s son.

The Romance of Reality TV

One of my guilty pleasures is watching Romance reality TV. Specifically, lately, it has been 90 Day Fiance, including the spinoff show, The Other Way.  Since I am watching this on a streaming service, I am always a season or two behind. Unlike others, I started my obsession with reality TV by watching The Amazing Race. It wasn’t always romance as such on there; oftentimes the opposite when it was couples. My husband and I would compare ourselves to the racers and see if we thought we could do better, or if we would have the same fights. One thing we both knew for sure was that we never would have done as well as the contestants.